"Busman's Holiday" is an unexpected wonder. A welcome surprise at every single turn. The phrase 'Busman's holiday' is used to describe a vacation that one takes where you find yourself doing the same thing you do for a living. The most common example is a lifeguard taking a break to spend all day at the beach. Or maybe a film critic, who takes some time off to hang out and do nothing but descend into the ever-expanding "required viewing list."

Written and directed by Austin Smithard, "Busman's Holiday" awakens the sleepy, depressive, and retired Michael Busman (Jamie McShane in a revelatory and brilliant understated performance) with a task. A distant cousin - Suzy (Jessica Doyle) - on a round-the-world journey hasn't come home. With a social media blackout and an overdue arrival, the family doesn't know whether the bug of adventure has inspired an off the grid detour, or much much worse. Despite his strained relationship with that side of the family, he follows in Suzy's footsteps, to pick up the trail.

Like all great detective stories, it's one that's as illuminating about the inner workings of the detective as it is about their subject. McShane's Busman is a lifelong 'beat cop.' This kind of missing person investigation experience is tenuously something that he's associated with, but he's no expert. Watching McShane, posture up with authority, literally and figuratively leaning in, to pressure those people he's interrogating show his inexperience. He's got a brutish, disrupting style that makes his interview subjects sense that he's more of disgruntled relation rather than an investigator.

After each encounter with one of Suzy's friends Jens Christian Buskov Lund's Anders, Ettore Nicoletti's Franco, Sumeet Thakur's Raj and Valentina Violo's Angelique; the greater the uncertainty. Suzy made an impact, and they don't want to break the sanctity of their friendship with this stranger. McShane's choices as Busman improve the performances of the supporting cast. McShane settles into the silences, and you're allowed to get cozy with your preconceptions, prejudices and premonitions of what could have transpired.

Smithard's formal decisions in "Busman's Holiday" have this strange effect on you. Shot in the blisteringly crisp 4K - with some brief snippets of phone footage in guerrilla travel situations - it feels like a third person, fish out of water travelogue. The lack of manipulation has a strange quality. Suppose you've ever agonised through the thousands of amateur digital shots one taken on any international holiday. In that case, you'll realise that perhaps fifty are quality - capturing the felt magic in the snap. So much of the aesthetic of "Busman's Holiday" is a lack of magic, so when Smithard finds it for Busman (McShane) to experience it has a surreal quality. A beautiful leafy suburban street in Sydney, the glorious Northern lights, an Italian sunset, a temple on the water in India; you can feel the luck and spontaneity. Rather than a first-person narration to muse on what's happening, Smithard uses Suzy (Doyle) reading her postcards - these written breadcrumbs along the winding globe-trotting path and Busman's check-ins with the world to help stay on the trail.

Is this a 'busman's holiday'? McShane's been a beat cop, a community protector. This task is as much a journey of self-reflection and interrogation as it is finding Suzy. He's not doing what his job is, perhaps exercising the muscles of what might have been. "Busman's Holiday," is the last narrative album of a pre-COVID world. Embracing connections by refusing to accept the certainty of virtual footprints we leave behind.

★★★/★★★★